The Curtain Goes Up...

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern

My name is Michael David.

My passport says Michael David Boyd, which is my legal name, and thus the name that I use in everyday life, but when it is practical for me to do so, I intend to legally change it. Most recently, I had styled myself as Michael David Boyd Eagleton, the latter being my mother's family name, both out of respect for my mother and also as a reflection of the fact that I had come to have serious problems with my father's family. Currently, I am completely estranged from both branches of my family, and this will not change barring a revolutionary conversion on their part. If I am able to find a wife and get married as I hope to, I would like to take her last name if she and her family don't object.  This story is one of the many that I hope to be able to tell.

I have had such an extraordinarily interesting and unusual life that there is no way that I can even begin to describe myself in only a few paragraphs. So instead, I will eschew any effort at a full bio and mention only a few highlights, and then state the mission of this blog.

I am a blue-chip nerd–National Merit Scholar, Stanford University alum, started writing simple computer programs when I was seven or eight (in the mid 80s), started studying advanced math and physics when I was a teenager, and spent fifteen years working for patent lawyers.

I am what they sometimes call a polymath. There are not a lot of people who can solve an eigenvalue equation, write a movie screenplay that captures the attention of lots of people in Hollywood, build a website, name every model of car sold in America in the last forty years, or at least about 99% of them, and cook an excellent vegan pasta dish from scratch. I am one of the rare people who has a strong interest in hardcore science, and an equally strong interest in literature, history, spirituality and the arts, but also knows the best nightclubs in Vegas...or did six years ago anyway.

I have been writing seriously since I was 14 when I started a novel which I never finished because the purchase of Chrysler by Daimler-Benz made the central plot element impossible, though since Chrysler is domestically owned again, I may revisit it at some point. I completed my first, and to date only, finished novel, The Killing of Henry Hughes, in 2001, which I published for free on my website several years ago. In addition, I have written a few dozen short stories, hundreds of essays, a smattering of poems, and half a dozen film screenplays, one of which, All-Nighter, started production but never finished. I hope to resurrect it.

I created the term “middle-sider” to describe myself, because I am both an insider to a degree and an outsider to a degree. I have at times in the course of a single day been in social situations with people from the top 1% of society and the bottom 1% of it. You have a lot of people who go from rags to riches, but all my life, I've essentially been both rich and poor at the same time. I lived nearly my entire life in a position of “cash-poor privilege”, until, through a series of unfortunate events, the culmination of a number of dramatic changes in my life, I spent five years in prison from February 2013 to February 2018, and am currently on parole, which is fascinating and exasperating.

Prison was an incredibly interesting, traumatic and transformative experience, but the eighteen months that I have been out on parole have been even moreso. I won't be writing about all of that here. But I am fully dedicated to being a writer now, though not to the complete disregard of other interests and opportunities. I have been privileged to live an extraordinary life, and I have many stories to tell.

This blog has seven primary missions:

1. To come out of the closet in a manner of speaking, as a Black man, son of a Christian pastor no less, who at 43 years of age realized that the social group that I most closely relate to is Jewish women, and to promote the book that I have nearly finished that tells the story of this journey. This blog is dedicated to my love and admiration for the Jewish people, especially Jewish women, more especially Jewish actresses, and most especially Jewish actresses who started working as kids—The Jewish MAT Girls.

2. To try to get in touch with the Jewish actress with whom I had a chance encounter in Las Vegas seven years ago that I had wanted to work with for years before that, but foolishly did not capitalize on the opportunity to meet her for a laundry list of stupid reasons.

3. To create enough interest to generate opportunities for other writing projects that I have either completed or contemplated. To sell myself as a writer, I need to establish that I am able to tell stories that are interesting to people, and I believe that this story will be interesting to a good number of people.

4. To attempt to reach out to the Jewish community in an effort to bring an end to the period of isolation that has defined nearly the last decade of my life, and like the trailer for the directorial debut of one of my original favorite (awesome but not Jewish) MAT Girls says, finally “Find My Tribe”.

5. In order to complete the book I am working on, I need to consult with some members of the Jewish community about some of its content, particularly some Jewish women. There are so many raging antisemites out there, I want to be careful to avoid saying anything in my book that might be inadvertently counterproductive. I hope that this blog will help bring me in touch with some people who may be interested in spending some time talking with me and reading some sections of my draft to help out with that.

6. To serve as an outlet for me to share a few of the many things on my mind during this dramatic and interesting point in history. I have a lot that I want to say about a lot of things, and like all artists, I need an audience.

7. To try to find a new landlord. So if any of you Jewish girls have an apartment for rent in San Diego...

As a final note, if you are one of the celebrities mentioned on this blog, and you stumble upon it or hear about it and find something that I say about you objectionable for any reason at all, upon request from someone that I can reliably trust represents you, I will take it down immediately. If some of you saw my last blog, where I went a little off the rails at one point, don't worry! I'm going to be a lot more careful this time. I know a lot of stuff is said about you all and you must develop thick skin, but I'm not The National Enquirer and I make this offer to remove anything objectionable without debate not only because I want to have a career in entertainment and don't want to make any (unnecessary) enemies, but also because I'm a compassionate, empathetic human being and I know that no matter how rich or famous or successful you are, when somebody says something that hurts, it hurts. I don't expect that anything I'll be saying here will be hurtful to anyone—or else I wouldn't say it—but if I'm wrong, let me know.

To everyone, celebrity or not, I hope that you are enriched in some way by reading this blog, and further hope that if you are, you will pass it along to others. Without others to spread the word, one person's voice is just an echo in the dark...

Michael David (Boyd Eagleton)

San Diego, California, USA

September 9, 2019

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern